Entries in Mercedes
(6)

One of the biggest stories in Formula 1 has been the struggles of the McLaren-Honda team to be competitive. When the Japanese automaker rejoined the F1 circus one year into the 1.6-liter V6 hybrid formula, it was expected to rocket to the top of the timing sheets based on past performance and the fact that it had sat out a year in order to assess the situation before settling on a powertrain design. Unfortunately, the Honda powertrain proved to be seriously down on power, and suffered from a number of other troubles including an overheating battery pack. It was far from competitive.

Rectifying the problem was made more difficult by the FIA’s token system that limited development — and cost — by dividing the power unit into sections, then allowing certain number of tokens to cover these areas while limiting the total number of tokens that could be used during the season. If you got your sums right the first time, this restriction wasn’t a problem. Get them wrong, however, and you could find yourself unable to make significant gains during the season; a fate that befell both Honda and Renault, though not quite to the same extent.

Nissan has just launched a redesigned and reengineered small pickup, the NP300 Navara, in Europe, and claims it is as comfortable and refined as the company’s crossovers. What’s of most interest is that the Navara is the stablemate to the Nissan Frontier, which is ripe for change in 2016. Interestingly, the double cab version of the truck comes with a five-link rear suspension to improve ride quality without compromising payload capacity, durability or off-road performance. It’s reported to be 44 lb. lighter than the outgoing live axle system. We’ll have to wait and see if it makes the trip across the Atlantic.

Former VW Group CEO Dr. Martin Winterkorn at VW Group Night prior to the Frankfurt Motor Show standing in front of prophetic words.I believe there are two reasons VW’s engineering staff chose to create a software cheat that defeated its diesel-powered vehicles’ onboard emissions system. The first is a combination of pride and pressure. Pride in the German nation’s seeming mastery of technology, and pressure from VW’s centralized management structure to create a passenger car diesel engine that could meet U.S. emission standards and produce hybrid-like fuel economy numbers.

Once Toyota used TRW Power Systems Division technology to create the first production hybrid, everyone else was late to the party. They could not a create a unique vehicle with hybrid power as Toyota had already done that with the Prius. What the German automakers could do was grab the best available technology, combine it with years of experience in the production of passenger car diesel engines, and create a class of automobile and light truck that did not demand a sacrifice of style, size, space or driving fun, all while returning exemplary fuel economy. No one was more interested in this stratagem than VW.

It had to happen, and in fact happened once before. Seven-time Formula One World Champion Michael Schumacher has announced his retirement from the sport. It’s easy, now that his days of dominating the series are past, to discount the level of talent Michael Schumacher possesses, and the way in which he, Ross Brawn and Rory Byrne utterly transformed Ferrari’s F1 team from an embarrassment into a world beater. So essential were these three to the process that the absence of one, Rory Byrne, has been enough to make the Mercedes F1 team a second-tier player at best.

There’s an old saying that, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.” Tell that to the legal department at Mercedes-Benz. When German customs officials seized a replica 300 SL, Mercedes exercised its rights — upheld by German courts who said it is an infringement of Mercedes’ rights if third parties market a replica body, even if it does not contain any of the automaker’s logos or trademarks — and destroyed the body.

The 300 SL’s shape has been under copyright protection as a work of applied art since the 1950s. In addition, the body shape was trademarked by Daimler AG (Mercedes’ parent). The trademark was confirmed in a final and binding judgment on December 9, 2010, by a Stuttgart regional court in a case where a German company had built a replica of the Mercedes 300 SL.